The Transcript

How to Strengthen Your Talents

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me yet, I am a co-founder and the Chief Content Officer for Copyblogger Media. I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business, or your career, exactly the way you think you should.

I wanted to let you know that the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer are brought to you by Authority Rainmaker. Authority Rainmaker is a live educational experience that presents a complete, effective online marketing strategy that immediately helps you accelerate your business.

Sean joined us last year and he’s going to be joining us again this year, which I am really looking forward to. So if you do want more details on that, you can head on over to rainmaker.fm/event.

So Sean D’Souza is my guest today. He runs the website Psychotactics, which is an intriguing site. It’s psychotactics.com and I encourage you to go and investigate that.

Sean, it’s great to have you here today.

Sean D’Souza: Well it’s great to be here. It’s nice to hear your voice.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, it’s good to hear your voice too. I haven’t really spoken to you other than in text, since we saw each other last May, so it’s good to talk with you.

Today, Sean and I are going to talk about the topic of talent, and Sean, I know you have been chewing this theme and this idea for a long time. I know you have a lot of thoughts on talent and I really wanted to start to draw at least a few of those out today.

How Sean Became Fascinated with the Idea of Talent

Sonia Simone: So do you want to start by talking about what got you so fascinated with this topic of talent?

Sean D’Souza: You probably know that I draw cartoons and often draw cartoons in public. As I’m sitting in a cafe and drawing a cartoon, people come up to me and say, “Oh, you are so talented.”

And at first it used to flatter me, but over time it started to irritate me. Because I would say, “Oh, you can do it too” and they go “No, no, no, I’m not that talented.”

And so the problem that I have, and I classify it as a problem, is that I am very good at dancing, cooking, drawing, writing and speaking. I can pretty much throw myself at anything, except putting up a picture on the wall, and I get talented at it.

And other people seem to think that they are not talented. That somehow they have to be born with that stuff. And that’s the part that started to irritate me, so what I had to do was, I couldn’t just go out there and say, “It’s easy to acquire a talent. It’s easy to get talented” because people would say, “No, no, no, you look at that guy in school, he was so much better than me in math.” Even Jim Collins, who wrote the book Good to Great, he talks about people who are kind of genetically encoded to doing better at math than he was.

So to me that was very frustrating and so the only way I could prove that was to say, “Okay, let’s go to a cafe, any cafe. You choose it. You pick 20 people from the room and in six months I will make them do something that I know that they can not do. And that one thing was cartooning.

I mean you can get people who are good at math, good at writing, good in lots of stuff, but you can go to any cafe and say to them, “How many of you can draw really good cartoons?” And no hands go up.

Sonia Simone: Right.

Sean D’Souza: So that’s what I started. That was one of the things that I thought, if I can teach people how to do something that almost everyone on the planet says they can not do, well now we can prove other things from there. That was the starting point.

The starting point was really my frustration with people calling me talented and believing that they didn’t have that talent.

Sonia Simone: You have a wonderful observation about children that I heard you share years and years ago, and I immediately forgot who I heard it from and have been repeating it ever since, but I love this observation. Do you want to share that with people?

Sean D’Souza: Yes. It’s like this. It’s when you go into a school, any school, anywhere on the planet, and I like these things which are universal rather than, “Okay, this only belongs to Virginia or this only belongs to Auckland.

But you can go to any school on the planet and if the kids are approximately five years old and you say, “How many of you can draw?” and almost across the planet you will find that all the hands go up. Everyone’s hands go up. And you ask the same people when they are ten, “How many of you are good at drawing?” and almost none of the kids in the class say they are good at drawing.

Now that’s only half the story. The next part of the story is even more interesting. If you went to that same class when they were five and said, “How many of you are good at English? How many of you are good at math? How many of you are good at geometry? And no hands go up. And then you go to the same class when they are ten and you’ll find quite a substantial number of hands going up.

So what happened? What happened from the age of five to ten? And that’s the question we have to ask ourselves. How did they get bad at drawing? How did they get better in math, English and geometry?

So what’s really happening between the age of five and ten is that you are actually learning stuff and you are learning it in a constructive way. You are learning it in a way that enables you to improve. And you have teachers, you have encouragement, you have people at home and what’s happening is, you are acquiring a talent. You are acquiring a language. Geometry is a language. English is a language and art is a language. And when that gets dropped, then the brain does what it’s supposed to do. It says, “This is not relevant to me” so it stops.

What Lemurs and Human Babies Can Tell Us About Our Innate Abilities

Sean D’Souza: If you look at lemurs — you know most of us don’t think of lemurs, but scientists have done tests on kids and lemurs. And a kid that is just a year old can spot one lemur from another one. Six month old kids. I mean they can’t say it, but what they do is measure the attention and as soon as the second lemur comes along, they go “Oh, that’s a different lemur, let me look at it. That’s a third lemur. Let me go and look at that.” But when the first lemur comes along they go, “Oh, I have seen that one before. Do you have anything new for me?”

So the attention span drops and you think, “Well, I don’t have that skill. I can’t tell one lemur from another.” But the skill isn’t lost. Certain skills are right there from the start and certain skills have to be learned. If you look at all the people who spot whales and dolphins and stuff, they can tell. They can say, “Hey, that dolphin. That’s the name for this dolphin.” And they know 300 dolphins. It’s a skill.

Sonia Simone: It’s a skill.

Sean D’Souza: Yeah. Certain skills are inherent in you. Photoshop is not one of those things, you know.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, although it feels that way to me, but I agree.

Sean D’Souza: Because in the big scheme of things, the brain uses up an enormous amount of energy, so you have to understand that, I think it’s 2% of your body mass and it uses up 25% of the energy.

So the brain is built to be lazy. The brain is built to be efficient. Anything that is difficult, the brain tries to drop. Anything that’s not usable, like lemur spotting, is not valid for the brain anymore so it drops it. And anything that you say, “Well, I have to learn how to ride this bicycle or I will not get to school” now it’s important for the brain, so it learns that. And that’s really what talent is all about. It’s about learning a language, learning a skill and like any language, there are enormous amounts of difficulties.

The Misunderstandings About Talent that Keep Us Imprisoned in Mediocrity

Sonia Simone: I know that you get frustrated about some of the misunderstandings that people have around talent. What are the misunderstandings and misapprehensions around talent that really make you sad for people, or angry, or frustrated?

Sean D’Souza: Well the first thing is definitely that it’s inborn. Most talents are based on the generation that you live in.

So for instance, most of us know how to use a computer. Well you go back 100 years or 50 years and people would not know how to use a computer. But today, every kid going to school knows how to use a computer.

So effectively, when you say, “Hang on, I learned how to use a computer but that’s not really a talent.” Effectively what we are saying is, “If everyone can do it, it’s not a talent.”

Sonia Simone: Right.

Sean D’Souza: If you can play music better than me, then you have a talent. But if everyone can play music, that’s not a talent.

So if you can speak English, that’s a talent. Of course it is a talent. To someone speaking Mandarin, “Wow, you can speak English? That’s amazing.” Right?

And this is the problem. The problem is that we believe that it has to be inborn. That we were born with an accent. We were born with a language. We know that’s not true.

Sonia Simone: Yeah and I have a real frustration with this in the realm of business. I hear people, typically people who don’t own businesses, or don’t run businesses, who say “Well you can’t learn marketing. You can’t learn business. You can’t learn selling. That’s just a gene. You either have that entrepreneurial gene or you don’t have it.”

I’d be interested to hear your take on that, because I’m suspecting you have a similar take to mine.

Sean D’Souza: Yep. When I grew up, I grew up in a business oriented family. My parents ran their own business. Most of my uncles and I have six of them, ran their own business. So here’s how I learned business.

I would go to my father’s institute, he used to run a secretarial college. And I would sit there and eat, drink, and read comics. And you think, what did you learn doing that?

The thing is when you are around people when they are talking, that stuff isn’t going over your head all the time. A lot of it is going into your head. So they do certain things, they act certain ways, they get into certain messes and they fail, and you learn from all of that stuff.

So if you take someone who has been in a job oriented, you know, their parents have been job oriented, they have been job oriented, it’s very difficult to break out of that. So what they haven’t learned is the language of business. And when you spend enough time in the business, you learn it.

Let me give you a simple example. When I ask my niece to paint a sky, it’s different from the sky that you would paint. If I asked what was the color of the sky, you would say it’s blue but that’s not true. The color of the sky is blue right at the top, it’s blue and yellow ochre in the middle and usually about yellow ochre or pink right at the bottom, depending on the time of day.

Now, if my niece were to paint a sky, some teacher would go up to her and say, “Wow, that’s a great sky. That is so different from everybody else’s sky. And where did you learn it?” And she has no recollection because she has learned it when she was seven years old and now she’s 11 and she has no recollection. And that’s what happens in business as well.

You pick up all these things along the way and then you don’t remember where you picked it up and then when everyone starts telling you “Hey, you are so talented,” you think, “Yeah, I must be.”

Sonia Simone: I love it. That’s awesome.

The Difference Between Personality and Talent

Sonia Simone: I know I’ve heard you talk about people confusing personality and talent, and I would love to hear you unpack that a little more and talk about what that means.

Sean D’Souza: When I first started trying to figure out why people get so stuck on talent, I was mixing up personality and talent. And personality is kind of inborn. I have seen this with my nieces. They have completely different personalities. As do all animals and humans. And one is driven to behave in a certain way.

My younger niece Kara is more likely to listen to something if there is lots of movement involved. And on the other hand with Marsha, you can sit there at the same table for three hours and it doesn’t bother her in the slightest. And the point is, they are trained to learn something. Everyone is kind of put into Marsha’s box, which is “Now you sit at the table, you sit at the desk and you learn the stuff. When you sit in school, you learn stuff.”

Now if you find that people are not responding to whatever you are doing, or whatever you are teaching them, it’s probably because you are not actually catering for their personality. Which is totally different from “Oh, this person is really stupid.” Because I don’t actually believe in bad students. I believe there are bad teachers and we’ll get into that. That’s the difference between personality and talent.

That talent can be acquired — if you switch it or cater it for that personality.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, I think that’s a really good observation.

Why You Don’t Need 10,000 Hours (or Anything Close to that) to Develop a Talent

Sonia Simone: Now a lot of people who talk about the difference between talent and practice, reference the 10,000 hours model. “You have to spend 10,000 hours to get really good at something.” Is that what you are talking about, when you talk about acquiring talent?

Sean D’Souza: 10,000 hours is a nice figure and that’s why people love it. I mean, two kinds of people like it.

Or rather two people refer to it: Ones who haven’t completed the 10,000 hours and the others who have. And the ones who have go, “Yeah, I did 10,000 hours.” Well you can go 10,000 hours in the wrong...